Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  This was no mistress. This was my other granddaughter.

  “Gwen?” I breathed.

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “How do you know my name? What do you want with my father?”

  “Hush, Gwen, don’t be rude. Help me to sit up. Then give your seat to our guest.”

  “As you will, Father.”

  The sullenness in her voice was clearly meant for me, not for him. With skill that must have come from long practice, she slid her hands under his armpits and helped him sit. Then she took her place next to him and continued to scowl at me. Now that they were side by side, I could see that she bore considerable resemblance to her father, but I suspected she was more like her mother in temperament.

  “Pray, be seated, Grey Lady, and tell us, if you will, why you have come.”

  “I am a healer,” I said as I sat. It seemed my most useful credential. “It may be that I can ease your pain.”

  “Who told you I was ill?” he spoke in a sharper tone than I had heard him use before.

  All at once I remembered how serious it was for a Celtic king to be sick or wounded, code for impotent. Whoever his mortal wife might be, the king was wed to land itself, the goddess of sovereignty. If he were unmanned, the land would not prosper.

  “Was it my wife, was it Queen Boudica?” Again that mix of longing and fear in his voice, in his face.

  “No, the queen did not tell me.”

  “Then who did? It’s important. I must know.”

  “I needed no one to tell me,” I answered. “The Grey Hag knows all.”

  That sounded hokey even to my ears. And it wasn’t true. I hadn’t known. I had come here to snoop, to find out what tight-lipped Boudica wouldn’t tell me.

  “Actually, I didn’t know,” I confessed, “until I walked into the room. Then, if you will pardon me for saying so, it was obvious, at least to a healer, which I swear I am. Will you let me help you?”

  “I don’t mean to be rude.” He used that word again. No wonder he was a client king. It wasn’t greed; it was fear of giving offense. To anyone. “But if you did not know I was ill, why did you come?”

  I sighed. Once again: the choice. Suddenly I was tired of spinning tales, spinning the truth, tired of spinning. They say deceit weaves a tangled web. But fabrication is an art form. The truth is the raw, and often unappealing, material.

  “I wanted to find out why you and wife are separated.”

  “I thought everyone knew that,” he said almost bitterly. “Who are you that you don’t know what everyone gossips about around every hearth in the land?”

  A reasonable question, especially considering that I had just claimed to know all. I sighed again, and then took a deep breath.

  “I’m your long-lost mother-in-law.”

  There were no pins to hear drop and no angels dancing on pinheads who might have staggered to a stop, but it was that kind of a silence. Father and daughter stared at me, as if my face were a Rosetta stone, the map, not to a treasure, but to some fearful place that had never been explored or even discovered. Despite what might be considered unnerving scrutiny, I felt strangely calm. My secret was out. Whatever happened next was up to somebody else.

  “Why. Did. You. Abandon. Her.”

  How had I not noticed that Gwen’s voice was like her mother’s, low, harsh, like something sharp being scraped against rock or bone. I looked into her eyes, bright as Sarah’s, though their brightness had a different source. She did not look away.

  “I did not abandon your mother, Gwen. She was taken from me by force. This I swear on my life and on my death.”

  It was such a relief, such a blissful relief to say this truth, this simple truth. For a moment I forgot the rest of story and all my reasons for keeping silent.

  “Have you told her?” Prasutagus asked. “Have you told Boudica?”

  And all my relief turned to dismay as it hit me all at once: to tell her estranged husband first was a betrayal, a huge betrayal. If I had not betrayed Boudica before, I had now. Without a word, I rose to leave only to encounter Roc and a maid in the entry way bearing platters of food and a flagon of wine.

  “Stay,” the King said; it was the closest thing to a command I had heard him utter. “You asked if you could ease my pain. Stay then. Stay and hear me.”

  I turned around and sat back down on the stool as the servants placed the food on a low table in front of the couch—olives, figs, the foods I had been missing, imported foods, the kind that would keep. Given the condition of his estate, I suspected they were now delicacies. I accepted a cup of wine, also light, fragrant, tasting of the sun, air, and soil where the grapes had been grown far from this damp, misty place.

  “Eat, drink,” the king said.

  He took nothing himself, I noticed, and Gwen only nibbled at a fig. I took a fortifying sip of wine.

  “Now I will tell you,” he began. “Boudica was right. She was right, and she will not forgive me.”

  “No, Father,” Gwen protested. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known. You did what you thought was best.”

  This exchange between father and daughter had a ritual quality, as if it had been repeated over and over. Each one knew their part by heart, and nothing was ever resolved, only temporarily relieved. I looked at the king, who even faded and ill was not unhandsome. He had a kindness about him that could be mistaken for weakness, or exploited as weakness.

  “But I should have known,” the king continued his part in the litany of reproach and reassurance. “Everyone knows about the Romans. They are conquering the whole world. The tribes of Gaul could not stand against them. They used the tribes against each other. I knew they would do that here, too. I knew the tribes would never unite. I did not want to see more slaughter. I thought to disarm the Romans, not by surrendering, but by coming to terms. I thought other tribes might follow my example, but I was wrong, wrong about that and wrong about Roman rule. I thought we could prosper under it. I thought they understood that our prosperity would be to their advantage, to everyone’s advantage.”

  “Father,” Gwen came in on cue. “Your reasons were noble, and for a time all was well. Don’t you remember how it was when I was a little girl, the riches we shared with everyone, the great feasts? How happy we all were then!”

  I sensed they had forgotten my presence and were speaking only to each other, or not even to each other, to themselves, to their loneliness. I wondered how Gwen, whom I could easily picture in a chariot, had come to be her gentle father’s comforter, while Lithben, clearly more timid, was tethered to her relentless mother’s sword arm.

  “King Prasutagus,” I remembered the question Lithben had not answered. “I have heard that you did revolt against the Romans when they tried to disarm the Iceni and the other tribes, that you and Boudica rallied the tribes and led the rebellion together. Is that not true?”

  “It is true!” Gwen turned to me, for the first time without hostility, her dark eyes bright. “And they won. You won, didn’t you, Father!”

  “Cariad, no, we didn’t win, though your mother married me as she agreed to do if I would fight beside her. And the cause was just. It is one thing to be a client kingdom, another to be disarmed and treated like slaves. So yes, I fought, fought hard. But even our bravest warriors are no match against an organized professional army.”

  “But you kept your weapons,” I said. “The tribes were not disarmed. Is that not a kind of victory? Wasn’t that the whole point?”

  Gwen looked at me and nodded earnestly, for the first time seeing me as a possible ally in her (I feared losing) battle to glorify her father.

  “Yes, that was the point,” he conceded.

  Then he fell silent and just looked at me, as if he wished I could read his mind, absolve him without his having to say more. I felt myself shaking my head, almost imperceptibly. There is no easy way, I spoke to him in my mind.

  “Gwen, will you leave us?”

  Perhaps if he had commanded her, sh
e would have obeyed. But she was her mother’s daughter—and my granddaughter—and she balked.

  “Do not make me, go, Father. I am a grown woman now. Do not treat me like a child.”

  It was true, I thought, at almost fourteen there was very little left of the child in her—except her need to believe in her father’s perfection.

  “You do not have long,” I heard myself saying.

  And as soon as I spoke the words, I knew they were true. Even if I could ease Prasutagus’s pain, I could not call him back from the death that waited for him, confident, patient. You could not call someone back unless he wanted to come.

  “We kept our weapons, and I thought we would keep our peace, because... because of what I offered them.”

  He paused for a moment, as if winded. Gwen held a cup to his lips, and then wiped his forehead where he had broken a sweat.

  “Your mother doesn’t know,” he said to his daughter. “Boudica doesn’t know. Yet maybe somehow, without even knowing it, she does. Maybe that is why everything came to bitterness between us, even when we still prospered. Before they took everything we are and owned. They call it repayment of a loan,” he explained to me, “what they first proffered as a gift, what some people called my price. The new procurator claims we owe interest, too. Interest he calculates, his own interest to which there is no limit.”

  The procurator, the man I had seen on the shore, waiting to greet the new governor, the man who did not know that governor was his father, just as Boudica did not know I was her mother. And I had twice taken that man’s father as a lover, once knowing who he was, once not. I felt sick at the thought of all these secrets.

  “But Boudica knows all that,” protested Gwen. I noticed that she did not refer to her as mother. “She blames you. She’s always blamed you for everything.”

  “And she is right, I tell you,” said the king, “more right than she knows, more right than you know. My own body bears witness. Yes, I am impotent. I gelded myself.”

  Suddenly I felt impatient with the king’s self-accusation. I looked from him to my granddaughter. Her father asked too much of her, more than Boudica asked of Lithben. Adoration, exoneration, things she tried desperately to give, yet he refused to receive. She gazed at him steadily, just a tiny furrow to one of her brows betraying any uncertainty.

  “Tell me what you mean, Father,” she said. “Please tell me. I will help you.”

  He put his face in his hands. I hoped he would not weep; I was afraid I would want to smack him. Then he straightened up, and turned to her, and I felt my respect for him, almost doused, flicker back.

  “You cannot help me, dear child of my heart, brave daughter more fit to rule than I ever was. I have betrayed you, too. In exchange for keeping our weapons, for our being left in peace, I promised to will the country of the Iceni to the Roman Empire.”

  I looked as Gwen took in his words. I watched her tighten the muscles of her face so her expression would not change.

  “And now my death is near,” he went on. “What will become of you and Lithben? What will become of my people? What will become of my queen? Slaves, all of you, slaves.”

  Gwen lifted her hands and placed them on her father’s cheeks. Only when his tears began did she allow her own to spill, and even then she made no sound.

  “King Prasutagus,” I said, unable to bear another moment of helpless witness. “When you made this agreement, did you sign anything?”

  “Sign?”

  He turned to me as though he could not remember who I was or how I came there.

  “Sign,” I repeated. “Put your name or mark to a document?”

  “I know what sign means,” he said, a bit querulous. “I know Roman ways well enough, the gods know, and to my sorrow. There was a document, a treaty. But I did not sign it.”

  “Then how can it stand?” I asked him. “How can you say you have given your kingdom away, if you did not agree?”

  Gwen looked at me as if I might be a beam of dawn light slipping beneath a closed door.

  “Ah, but I did agree,” he said. “I gave my word. They wanted my mark, but I refused. Among the combrogos, I told them, word is sacred, word is law. If you will not take it, then leave it. I am still king here.”

  It was then that my own tears had their way, to think that this king had made one last stand on his word, on the power of the spoken word, when he had given everything else away.

  “But, Father,” said Gwen. “They have not kept their word to you. Did they ever tell you the gifts they gave were a loan? Did they ever say they would come due? Did you ever agree to such a thing by word or any other way?”

  Here she was, her mother’s daughter, after all, the granddaughter of the druid Lovernios, stuck in a ruined villa with a dying king, prepared to think her way clear.

  “I did not,” he answered slowly.

  “Then, Father,” said Gwen. “There is no harm done.”

  “No harm done?” he repeated bewildered.

  He seemed at once a very old man and a young child, too tired to resist any more, willing to be put to bed.

  “We will make a new will, your true will, a document. You will make your mark on it.”

  “I never learned to write,” the king said.

  “We will find someone who can, Father,” soothed Gwen.

  I could have slipped away then. If only I had.

  “If you could write, what would you say?” I asked. “What would you will?”

  The king looked at me as if he wished he had never seen me, as if I were indeed his death, a rude and impatient death, jostling him out of life as he knew it.

  “Would you leave it to my mother?” Gwen asked in a tight voice. “Would you leave the tribe to Boudica’s rule?”

  The king let out a long sigh, as if he could exhale all the sorrow and futility of his life.

  “If only I could, I would. She is a better, braver leader than I am, but the Romans would never let her rule; they know she is sympathetic to the resistance. There would be a legion here before my body was cold. She’d fight, I know she would, she’d welcome a fight, but she could never win. And if they took her alive—”

  His voice broke again; I did not blame him. I had lived in Rome. I had seen with my own eyes what happened to celebrity captives. I knew how they were shackled so they could not kill themselves to avoid the humiliation of being paraded before the crowds.

  “Then, Father,” Gwen took a breath in, as if gathering up all the defeat of her father’s sigh to change it, to charge it with purpose again. “Leave the rule of the Iceni to me. To me and Lithben. We are your daughters. We both know how to fight in battle, but you have trained me in diplomacy as well. Lithben will be guided by me. We know the old ways and the new ways. The people know us, they will trust us. And surely the Romans will respect that we are your heirs.”

  “They will not,” I cried out, alarmed by where my impulsive question was leading. “They hate and despise women who rule. They still haven’t gotten over Cleopatra. They will never tolerate it.”

  But Prasutagus was no longer hearing me or even Gwen. He was gazing into the middle distance, as if he could just glimpse something that had been for so long out of view, out of reach.

  “I know what to do,” he spoke at last. “I know what to will. Find me someone who can write, Gwen, however long it takes, however far you have to go.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Gwen, and she rose to go, clearly prepared to seek to the ends of the earth, and brave a Roman legion if need be.

  “I can write,” I heard myself say.

  And as soon as I spoke, I wished I had never learned. I wished I had told Joseph where to stuff his fantasy of the literate hetaera. No good had come of the written word, as far as I had ever been able to tell. No good would come of it now.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE HERO’S CUT

  BY THE TIME I left, the sun had journeyed to the west, and all the shadows of grasses, trees, small rises and hollows stretche
d in the opposite direction than they had when I set out on my impulsive morning jaunt. My mood had also reversed itself, my feet and heart so heavy it was a wonder I could walk. I had set forth with only my own secret, now I carried the confession of King Prasutagus as well. He had promised me that he would reveal his will to Boudica before his death and pleaded with me to keep his confidence. I had agreed, reluctantly, feeling that I had meddled more than enough. But I was already having second thoughts, and I was deep in them when Lithben stepped out from behind a tree at the crossroad and into my path.

  “Child,” I caught myself just before I stumbled. “You gave me such a fright. What are you doing here?”

  “I was waiting for you,” she said, and she surprised me by slipping her hand into mine. “I know where you went.”

  We fell into step together, walking along the rutted track to Boudica’s compound.

  “Does anyone else know?” I asked trying, unsuccessfully, to sound offhand.

  “No. I told them all you were tired from your journey and had gone to rest.”

  Resourceful child, I thought, feeling relieved, and then my relief immediately gave way to remorse that I had unwittingly dragged this child into a secret.

  “Is my father well?” she asked.

  I hesitated a moment and decided on the truth.

  “He is not well,” I said as gently as I could. “But your sister is taking very good care of him.”

  “I want to see him,” she stated.

  “Of course you do,” I answered.

  We walked the rest of the way in silence, hand in hand.

  “Your mother has been looking for you, Lithben,” the watch told her when we approached the gate. “She is overseeing the preparations for the feast. You are to report to her. And your daughter is looking for you,” he said to me. “She is waiting at your quarters.”

  I reckoned we were both in trouble.

  I found Sarah sitting cross-legged on the ground outside our hut, blunting the blade of a sword to be used for practice.